No need for the Cliché-killer

Late last year I had the good luck to be shown around the exhibition of Van Gogh's letters at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam by Ann Dumas, who is the curator of "The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters," which has just opened at the Royal Academy in London (and continues until 18 April).So I am in the happy position of being able to tell you what almost no one has noticed - that the Amsterdam show and the London show are almost totally different.The Amsterdam show was actually a rehanging of its own collection, so as to show the letters in the appropriate places in the gallery. Save for the letters, there is an overlap of only the 12 paintings loaned by the Van Gogh Museum in the RA exhibition, out of a total of 65 major paintings. There are also 30 drawings, plus 35 original letters - and this may well be the last time the letters are shown in a public exhibition, as each exposure to light increases the fading of the ink and its reactivity with the paper.Amsterdam just does not lend its most iconic pictures (the ones the tourists come to see, after all), such as "Irises," "Starry Night" and "The Potato Eaters."

This
means that Ms Dumas has had to do a great deal of work to put together a show
of this magnitude and brilliance. But what a success it is - the more so as
some of the great pictures are unfamiliar, a real and unexpected bonus when the
subject is the world's best-known, most popular artist. Given that we probably shan't see the letters again, this is the Van Gogh show of our
lifetimes, for which we owe thanks to BNY Mellon's sponsorship, and to the work
of Ms Dumas's co-curators in Amsterdam, Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke
Bakker, the editors of the spectacular Thames & Hudson five-volume (and weighing 12kg) "Letters." It's free on-line, but nothing beats handling the print
edition: every time reference is made to an image, whether it's a picture by
Van Gogh or another artist, the image is reproduced in the margins of or on the
gorgeous, art-paper page.

The
London show is rich with loans from the other Dutch big Van Gogh collection,
the Kröller
Müller Museum at Otterloo, who have loaned the 1889 "Still-life" with a Plate
of Onions," while "Van Gogh's Chair" (1888) from the National Gallery hangs
side by side with Amsterdam's "Gaugin's Chair", painted about the same time. The hanging of these paintings,
on the freshly painted cerulean walls of the RA, is a staggering example of the
great installation of this show. As everyone who's ever seen these side-by-side
has commented, these are portraits without faces; Van Gogh's luminously yellow,
upright woodedchair, with his
pipe and a twist of tobacco and its woven seat, standing on the cool, red
quarry -tiled floor contrasts with Gaugin's dark wood, elaborately curved
chair,on its upholstered seat a
lit candle and some books, while it stands on a warm, patterned carpet.The pictures date from the time when
the two painters were living together, sharing "The Yellow House" (also in the
London show) in Arles, acting out Van Gogh's doomed communal-living fantasy.

I
have to confess that when I went to Amsterdam, it was with a heavy heart and
Van Gogh-weary eyes - from over-exposure to the cult of these same iconic
pictures, or the ubiquitous reproductions of them, and too many hearings of Don
McLean's "Starry, starry night" and "Vincent's eye of china blue."

Several
things won me over.First, the
letters. On their evidence, Van Gogh was a great writer - in three languages.
Even in English he is observant, witty, and has a large vocabulary that he puts
to striking use. I was bowled over, too, by so many of their illustrations not
being sketches of work he was doing, but copies of finished work, to show his
brother Theo what he was doing - and in detail. I find him noble as a thinker,
too, daring and brave. Having been a religious nut, a born-again evangelical
bore for Jesus, he managed to give up his near-narcotic dependence on religion
without becoming an atheist bore. When he realized belief is foolish, he had
the courage simply to put his foolishness behind him, and not be bothered about
it again.

Seeing
a huge body of work all at once reminded me that Van Gogh had (nobly to my
mind) decided to become an artist, and
achieved greatness as a painter - in only ten years. And the clarity of the stages of this is so marvelous. His
social sympathies with his peasant subjects culminating in "The Potato Eaters"
give way to his interest in colour and the entirely beneficial influence of
Japanese prints on his line. Then there is what you can't see properly in
reproduction, his handling of paint, of textures and his brushwork. It has all
been a re-revelation for me, a rediscovery that what we all adored as
adolescents is good enough to appreciate properly and justly as grown-ups. Now
I can even look at "Irises" without feeling the need to reach for a spray can
of cliché-killer.